Pajiba January 2025 Book Recommendations Superpost!

New year, new books! How did you start off 2025?

Strange Pictures by Uketsu

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Japanese YouTuber Uketsu is best known for wearing a white papier-mache mask and making very surreal content. Now, he’s a writer, with his debut making its way to the English-language market with a translation by Jim Rion.

Strange Pictures, as the title suggests, is full of pictures, and invites the reader to piece together a curious mystery. Structured as a quartet of stories that seem unconnected but are revealed to be interlocking, the book opens with a high schooler discovering a weird blog by a man who details his happiness at getting married and his impending parenthood. The wife’s drawings seem to reveal something dark about her fate. Later, we find out about an unsolved murder, wherein the victim left behind his own drawing that might reveal his killer.

I can’t reveal much more than that since all of the stories are connected. Strange Pictures is certainly a diverting read with a fun hook. It’s not quite a ‘solve your own mystery’ book but it does have some of those qualities and that seems to be the major selling point for Pushkin, who are releasing the translation. For me, however, the concept was more interesting than the final product. The mysteries grow increasingly contrived and feel out of step with what is otherwise a pretty formulaic plot. You just end up wondering why these people would go to all the effort of making cryptic artwork rather than a simple statement.

Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler

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Did Octavia Butler predict the future? The late great queen of modern sci-fi has often been credited with writing one of the most eerily accurate dystopian novels of the past few decades. Parable of the Sower showed an America ravaged by climate change and a rising fascist government, and the sequel, Parable of the Talents, further details how a hard-right Christo-fascist movement swept across the nation under the rule of a despotic Presidential candidate who promises to ‘make America great again.’

I’m scared.

Butler’s work is fascinated by notions of control and consent. In Parable of the Talents, the political destruction caused by hard-right fanaticism in the name of a false God is heavily reliant on slavery and rape to maintain its shoddy theatricalities. Lauren Olamina has survived the carnage of the first novel and set up a small but thriving community centred on Earthseed, the religion she has created around the tenet, ‘God is change.’ It’s the antithesis of the current powers’ ideas, where anyone who questions their radicalism is the enemy and must be violently dealt with. Pushing back against fascism, even in minor and seemingly frivolous ways, is an act of radical rebellion, but also one in line with the ideas of Earthseed. Change is inevitable, the only constant in life, and to try and quash it is to miss the entire point of our existence. it’s no wonder that the ‘make America great again’ crowd hate it so much. In the book, obviously. This has nothing to do with real life, right?

Parable of the Talent is relentlessly bleak, but not without hope, as Butler knew that even the most hopeless situations can still breed a sense of optimism. There is light at the end of the tunnel here, but she also understood that nobody is immune to propaganda. Here, Lauren’s older half-brother Marc embraces the Christian hard-right ethos, finding it to have an easily condensed message and form of spiritual guidance than the prickly open doors of Earthseed. Not even being confronted with the abhorrent abuses of his chosen church can make him change his mind (insert ‘leopards eating my face’ joke here.)

I don’t think Butler was prophetic so much as she was just paying attention. We’re all currently confronting the agonizing realities of our current situation and the decades’ worth of socio-political and cultural shifts that led to this moment of goose-stepping tech bros and squabbles over Greenland. When Butler writes about a government forcibly removing children from dissenters’ homes, it’s because she knew it had happened before and there was nothing to stop it happening again. The same goes for internment camps and rape as a weapon of war. If it’s all too ‘on the nose’, that’s because the entire bloody world is. Subtlety died off with the dodo. The best we can hope for is to notice the big red lights before they become blinding.

Never Mind by Edward St. Aubyn

Apparently, after reading Parable of the Talents, I was in the mood for something even more depressing than a terrifyingly prescient dystopian thriller. Well, step forward Edward St. Aubyn and his Patrick Melrose series. St. Aubyn’s beloved five-part saga was heavily inspired by his own tumultuous life, and knowing that makes reading Never Mind, first of the quintet, an even heavier experience.

Set over the course of one day, the book follows the Melrose family. David, the patriarch, is an abusive bully who delights in the pain of others, particularly his wife and child. Eleanor, a wealthy American heiress, spends her days drinking and trying to avoid her tyrannical husband. Five-year-old Patrick already knows to stay out of his dad’s way, but as family friends come to visit, tensions reach an unbearable peak.

Never Mind is a short novel - barely 200 pages - but it fits in so much. St. Aubyn has a keen way with a turn of phrase that captures so much about this terrible situation while being both witty and mordant. He understands the unique tone of the English upper classes, where being an absolute arsehole with a scathing one-liner can reveal so much. David Melrose is an unbearable snob and the friends he invites are part of that hallowed elite where it’s a badge of pride to be hateful, exclusionary, and just plain dumb (if you’ve ever been around truly posh people, you’ll know what it’s like to listen to someone who thinks a clipped accent equals intellectual rigour.) This means that the book is often very funny, but it never sacrifices its aching pathos for the easy joke.

This is still a book about generational abuse and what it’s like to set up a child for total failure. St. Aubyn has often rejected descriptions of his books being emotional exorcisms but you can certainly sense an author unpacking a lot of pain and trying to find a philosophical gaze through unbearable agony. That this book is one of such emotional clarity feels like a straight-up miracle. I’m not sure I’ll rush to read the second one since it’s so heavy and it’s only going to get worse for poor Patrick but I am eager for more.